years, and that cheerfully, because I felt that our cause
was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was
making the way clear for her.

Miss Anthony could not entirely recover from the disappointment of her
reception in San Francisco, but a letter written to Mrs. Stanton, just
before her first lecture in Oregon, shows no regrets but a wish that
she had put the case even more strongly:

I am awaiting my Wednesday night execution with fear and trembling
such as I never before dreamed of, but to the rack I must go,
though another San Francisco torture be in store for me.... The
real fact is we ought to be ashamed of ourselves that we failed to
say the whole truth and illustrate it too by the one terrible
example in their jail. That would have caused not me alone but both
of us to be hissed out of the hall and hooted out of that Godless
city--Godless in its treading of womanhood under its heel. I assure
you, as I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that the very next
strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of
omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me
like that failure to speak the word at San Francisco over again and
more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having
said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil,
with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation
around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from
their united eulogies with that one word unsaid. To my mind the
failure to put our heads together and work up that lecture grows
every day a greater blunder, if nothing more. It was like going
down into South Carolina and failing to illustrate human oppression
by negro slavery. I hope you are not haunted with it as I am. God
helping me, I will yet ease my spirit of the load.

After this lecture she wrote again:

The first fire is passed. I send you the Bulletin and Oregonian
notices. I have not seen the Democratic paper--the Herald--but am
told it says Miss Anthony failed to interest her audience. Not a
person stirred save when I made them laugh. But tomorrow night's
audience will tell the people's estimate. My speech then will be on
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Last night I made the San
Francisco speech, but was not nearly so free and easy in the